Doctors prepare for political battle over US gun violence crisis

US gun violence “unrivalled” in developed world and requires research, doctors say.

Following Sunday’s tragic mass shooting in Orlando, Florida—the deadliest in US history—the American Medical Association has officially declared gun violence in the US an unrivaled public health crisis. With this declaration, the AMA will now actively lobby Congress to overturn legislation that has kept the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from researching gun violence for the past 20 years—legislation backed largely by the National Rifle Association.

"With approximately 30,000 men, women and children dying each year at the barrel of a gun in elementary schools, movie theaters, workplaces, houses of worship and on live television, the United States faces a public health crisis of gun violence. Even as America faces a crisis unrivaled in any other developed country, the Congress prohibits the CDC from conducting the very research that would help us understand the problems associated with gun violence and determine how to reduce the high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries. An epidemiological analysis of gun violence is vital so physicians and other health providers, law enforcement, and society at large may be able to prevent injury, death and other harms to society resulting from firearms."

The AMA now joins other medical organizations, including the American College of Physicians and American College of Surgeons, in declaring gun violence a public health crisis and pushing for renewed research. However, the declaration from the AMA may hold the most clout, as the powerful organization has a massive membership and is a top spender when it comes to lobbying. Between 1998 and 2011, the AMA came up as the second highest spender on lobbyists in the country, shelling out around $263 million.

The legislation that the doctors’ groups hope to overturn with such money stems from what some refer to as the Dickey Amendment, named after former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.). In 1996, Dickey successfully introduced legislation that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—the exact amount the agency used for firearm-related research. While the money was later added back to the CDC’s budget, so was wording in the appropriations bill that stipulated that the agency couldn’t use federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.”

Though that language doesn’t explicitly ban fire-arm research, it has effectively done so. “Removing the money from the budget and enacting the Dickey Amendment were the first and second shots across the bow by the NRA,” Mark Rosenberg told the LA Times. Rosenberg is a gun violence expert who was head of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the time the Dickey amendment passed. “The third shot is the idea that if you do this research, you’ll be hassled [by the NRA],” he added. “The result is that the CDC basically does nothing in gun violence research.”

Politicians, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have made attempts to strike the gun research stipulation but have had no luck. After the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre of schoolchildren, President Obama issued an executive order that the CDC resume firearm-related research, but the CDC has continued to avoid the topic, noting that it still lacks dedicated funding for the research.

From the little research that has been conducted on the topic, it’s clear that the US has a unique crisis of gun violence. Between 1983 and 2013, the US experienced 78 mass shootings, while 24 other industrialized countries combined experienced 41 mass shootings. The data also suggests that the number of mass shootings correlates with gun ownership rates in the 24 developed countries studied. The US has the highest gun ownership rate with 88 guns per 100 inhabitants. The second highest was Switzerland, with 45.7 guns per 100 inhabitants.

In addition to more research, the AMA also announced that it supports legislation for waiting periods before firearm purchases and background checks for all handgun purchases. AMA policies “recognize that uncontrolled ownership and use of firearms, especially handguns, is a serious threat to the public's health inasmuch as the weapons are one of the main causes of intentional and unintentional injuries and deaths,” the organization stated.

In an op-ed published Tuesday in USA Today, Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, denounced any calls for more gun control as a “head fake” and claimed that “political correctness” enabled Sunday’s deadly attack, which killed 49 patrons of a gay nightclub and left 53 others wounded.